


the lip of our understanding

by PJVilar



Series: Love You Back [3]
Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Angst, Cancer, Happy Ending, Healing, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Mama Stilinski Feels, Medical Procedures, Stiles is exhausted and thus a little OOC
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-10-05
Updated: 2012-10-05
Packaged: 2017-11-15 16:49:33
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,238
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/529438
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PJVilar/pseuds/PJVilar
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Stiles has cancer. He gets better. Sequel to "beyond the face of fear/may you kiss".</p>
            </blockquote>





	the lip of our understanding

Chemotherapy, radiation, steroids, hormone blockers, painkillers. Hospital, from parking lot to waiting room to treatment rooms to chapel. The free-floating combination of different cleansers and cleaners, the smell of hard-won sterility. The smell of the machines, hard plastic and warm bulb filaments and metals. 

The little packets of alcohol they use to wipe Stiles’ arm clean before inserting a butterfly needle there for blood draws.The smell of the needle itself. His blood.

Stiles asks Derek sometimes if he smells bad, if he can smell the chemo. Or if he can smell the cancer. Derek wishes he’d scented it before, had chased it screaming into the night, or at least down to stage one. It’s hard to explain that it’s just new, it’s just a top layer that wasn’t there before. Sometimes stronger suggestions of other people, like Melissa McCall and Lydia, who check in on Stiles and deliver homework, respectively. 

Up close like this, Derek can inhale past all that. There’s Scott and Stiles’ father, and the house. The school, the Jeep, the woods. There’s the mundane things like detergent and soap that can practically be batted aside. 

But the depth of it is just Stiles. His warmth. His humanity and his animal. The sweat and spunk of him, sweetness and odor.

It surprises Derek that he had to get this close before he could really know Stiles at all.

“Can you get your nose out of my armpit?” he mumbles.

Derek laughs, a sharp exhale. 

“No.”

***

The first time Stiles’ mother had breast cancer she was pregnant. She was treated, and cured, but more cautiously than she would have been had there not been a baby in her body. Stiles’ dad has always told him there was no other choice for them. He was wanted, and loved, and the best thing that ever happened to him and Stiles’ mom.

But the cancer came back six years later, and that time it spread.

The last two weeks of chemo are terrible. It gangs up on him, something Dr. Ayers and the rest of the staff warned could happen. But they warned about lots of other things that never happened, so it’s still a complete shock when the last two weeks are like a walking death. 

Stiles sometimes thought what a incredible relief it would be to have a quiet brain, a quiet body, even just for a little while. But it’s not. It’s not a relief that Scott has to nearly carry him to the comfy chair where the chemo gets hooked up to his port. It’s not a relief that he doesn’t have the energy or smarts to crack a basic joke about the telenovas that seem to always be on during his eleven a.m.s. It’s not a relief.

At the worst moments, it’s not a relief, but it does feel like karma.

***

At first Derek is there because. . . Stiles isn’t exactly sure. He showed up at the hospital out of a sense of duty or concern, maybe both. Then apparently he and Stiles’ dad got to talking -- he can’t imagine Derek ever ‘getting to talking’ with anyone, but the Sheriff does have that affect on people. 

“What did you tell my dad. . . about. . . “ Stiles means to say “us,” it’s not like he’s being coy. But he’s tired. The chemo is almost done. Then a break, then radiation. Then a bunch of tests. Then targeted chemo, another drug pumped into the port in his chest. 

His hair has thinned, but he hasn’t gone bald. His eyelashes hung on. His eyebrows have sadly taken a vacation, but Erica has made up for it with eyebrow pencil and a lack of fear. Ming the Merciless was the _best_.

“I told your dad I’m the one person you know who doesn’t have school or homework or lacrosse and I could help out because he’d probably need it. I think I was more polite than that.” Derek thinks it over for a minute, his hand dropping down to the back of Stiles’ neck. It’s warm and Stiles is always cold now, so it feels kind of good. “No, that’s how I said it.”

“Okay.”

“Then your dad asked me to stop bullshitting him.”

Stiles huffs out a laugh. His whole body vibrates with it on the couch. His prognosis is good, they’re saying. This is all a precaution, they’re saying. Derek’s hand start to feel overwarm and annoying but the presence of it is so awesome Stiles can’t bring himself to tell Derek to get off him.

It feels a little like he’s still alive.

“And did you?” Stiles asks. A lot of things have gotten him through this so far, not just Derek. Hardly. But the memory of elastic snapping against his hipbone those long months ago, and of Derek’s sigh of happiness when they were both completely naked -- that memory has gotten him through more than a few moments of physical hell. 

“I said I’d let him know when I’d stopped bullshitting you.”

Derek touches Stiles’ hair. It’s like a cub, he’s said, which makes Stiles want to punch something with his ineffectual arms and also nail Derek with his currently ineffectual dick. Although to his utter bafflement and delight, between healing from surgery and the start of chemo was a series of good days. Good days involving a lot of available surfaces, and his car, and the woods, and even the pile of laundry that passes for Derek’s own bed. Those times, it is was how he’d pictured. Pornographic, both of them mauling each other and whispering endearments, the sweetest of which was probably Stiles’ second afterglow speech to Derek: “Your timing fucking sucks”.

“I don’t know why you want me when I’m like this.”

“Weak, you mean.” Derek says. He tenses but doesn’t get up and walk away. Stiles can feel Derek commanding his wolf to stay, or maybe the wolf whining for the human not to flee. He’s still not entirely sure how these things work.

“Stiles, you’re surviving,” he mutters into Stiles’ ear. “Do you know how brave you are? I couldn’t do this. When I get hurt, I know it will heal. It’s a matter of hours. This is a year. I don’t know how you do it.”

Derek settles in beside Stiles as much as he can, with his head near Stiles’ stomach and his legs thrown over the far arm of the couch. The unspoken _if you make it_ is like a bloodstain; ugly and present but at the same time it’s kind of old news. This probably won’t kill him; he gets to live and fight another day. Which, in his case, is a fight that is severely literal and could _actually_ kill him, but, well. Stiles will gladly go back to running from beasts and hunters and throwing himself in harm’s way. He can’t imagine anything better.

Stiles folds back the afghan that covers his lower body, leaving his un-Derek covered side a bit covered to balance out the heat. It’s hard to get comfortable, to feel exactly right in his skin. That sounds like some other beings he knows. They’ve helped him learn how to do it.

Derek huffs against his chest. Poor guy isn’t used to these silences. Stiles decides to help him out.

“How I do it is not alone,” he says. Derek just presses his face against Stiles, and breathes it all in.


End file.
